Proposed and confirmed appointments: a difference that costs money

Ask a planner how many certain orders they have next week. They will need a moment to count, because both kinds of appointment look the same in the calendar: the agreed one and the one they only proposed and are still waiting for an answer on.

Yet the difference between them is fundamental. A confirmed appointment is a commitment: capacity is planned around it, material is bought for it and other work is turned down. A proposed appointment is a hypothesis.

How it gets worked around in practice

If the tool does not distinguish certainty, workarounds appear. Most often three:

• Colours. Yellow means a proposal, green a confirmation. But only the person who set them up knows what they mean.
• A question mark in the name. Novák service? It works until someone decides to tidy up the names.
• A second spreadsheet. Unconfirmed appointments on the side, confirmed ones in the main schedule. The two drift apart within a week.

All three share the same flaw: the information about certainty is not part of the data but a convention that someone has to know and follow.

What it costs

This is not a cosmetic matter. When it is not clear what is certain, three situations arise:

1. You turn down work you would have taken. Capacity looks full, but a third of the appointments are only proposed.
2. You promise capacity you do not have. The opposite case – a proposed appointment gets confirmed and suddenly two people are driving to two places.
3. No timely follow-up. Nobody notices an appointment that has stayed unconfirmed for three weeks until it is too late.

An unconfirmed appointment that you do not know is unconfirmed is worse than no appointment at all.

What it should look like

There is only one solution: the appointment type as a proper attribute, not a note. Everything else follows from that.

• A visual difference. A binding appointment has a solid colour, a non-binding one an outline. The difference is visible without reading.
• One click to switch. The customer confirms, you click, and the appointment is binding. If it took five steps, nobody would do it.
• Your own types. In some places proposed and confirmed are enough, elsewhere you also need substitute or cancelled. The list should be yours.
• A record of the change. Knowing when a proposal became a commitment comes in handy three months later.

A practical rule

Introduce a simple check: once a week, look at all non-binding appointments older than ten days. Either confirm them or cancel them. Nothing in between.

Appointments that stay uncertain for a month are not a schedule, they are blocked days that nobody has sold.

Multi-day jobs

It is the same problem. A three-day installation entered as three separate records only gets moved two thirds of the way, because the third record is forgotten. A multi-day appointment should be a single object that moves as a whole and, when moved, offers to move the assigned technicians too.